The landscape of software release is currently evolving as new trends and innovations are explored. A major goal of software development is to enable continuous delivery of value to end users of products, which may involve numerous individuals, processes, and products. The arena of “DevOps”, a portmanteau of “Development” and “Operations”, has grown to include multidisciplinary teams that may execute shared practices and tools, in contrast with conventional software development where development teams may code software to be tested over multiple trials toward an end goal of delivering a finished product to users that will be monitored for issues. Instead, DevOps recommends a multi-stage delivery pipeline for products that may be managed by a single multidisciplinary team. Once code is prepared, the software may traverse various stages, each of which serves a specific purpose. In a development environment, the software may undergo functional and performance tests, followed by deployment to a staging environment. In the organization of DevOps, a gradual exposure of software and updates to end users may be executed, such that exposure of the software in a production environment is split into multiple stages of deployment. Updates may be delivered to limited sets of users throughout the stages of deployment and monitored before being made available to a larger set of users. Once the deployed software has met and passed criteria and validation as set by the DevOps team according to the interests of stakeholders, it may be made available to all users.
In the DevOps pipeline, testing and monitoring of the software involves close observation. One aspect of the practice of DevOps is a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, where code building and integration occurs regularly in conjunction with continuous delivery of software to target environments. Transitioning from one stage to a next stage may aid successful and efficient delivery of the product. Monitoring programs control these transitions and may involve an extensive sign-off checklist prioritizing test results, application health, user experience, and other criteria. The sign-off checklist may differ between stages of the pipeline and may be actively managed and changed. While releasing the software, the checklist may need to be repeated until all of the criteria are completely and collectively met in the release environment.